The Pawnbroker

by Edward Lewis Wallant

  He took a burning-hot shower, followed it with shocking cold. Then in the surface peace of his numbed body, he lay on his bed and read from Anna Karenina in Russian, relaxing in the familiar words he had read several times since his youth.

  The crickets came and went; the darkness was very old when he finally put the book down and closed his eyes with the light still on.

  Through his opened window he heard the harsh, demanding whispers of his sister and brother-in-law in the next room. "If you're not too tired, honey..."

  Love.

  Sol thought even sleep would be better. His body relented, went limp. The room faded toward black.

  "I will sleep like the dead tonight," he said longingly.

  But he slept like the living.

  The guard wouldn't let him turn his head from the window, knocked with menacing playfulness on the side of his jaw every time he tried. So he looked into the vast room which was broken into many cubicles. There were women in each one, some standing at the open ends with weary expressions, some seated listlessly on their beds gazing at the floor. Wild laughter echoed from various parts of the great subdivided room and, like the perverted echo of the laughter, the low crushed sound of moaning.

  But for all the rest of the calibrations of the compass, the needle of his attention had only a disinterested hovering movement. His eyes swung back and forth in ever-lessening arcs until they settled with trembling force on the one cubicle. His wife, Ruth, sat on her bed with a sheet up over her nakedness and she didn't see him looking in, for her own attention was riveted on the entrance of her cubicle with terrified anticipation.

  "Let me go from here," he begged the guard.

  "You bothered and bothered. 'Whafs happened to my wife? What exactly is she doing?' you asked. 'Why did they take her from the Woman's Section?' You wouldn't be satisfied with half-truths, would you? 'I must know exactly,' you said. All right, I got fed up with you. So here we are. I'm being generous, I'm taking you to see for yourself," the guard said, giving another of those little nudges to the side of Sol's jaw. "So look, keep looking, that's what you're here for. After this you won't ask me any more, you'll know."

  "I know now, I understand. It is enough. Please, I couldn't stand to see any more," he whimpered, dry spasms shaking his body like chastising hands.

  "You'll stay and you'll look, once and for all," the guard said, pressing his short truncheon into Sol's neck.

  So he turned back for what he deserved.

  A black-uniformed man entered Ruth's cubicle. He took off his clothes and for a few minutes just displayed his exposed body to the terrified woman on the bed. Finally he pulled the sheet from her nakedness. He seemed to be speaking to her, but only silence reached Sol outside the glass. Ruth began shuddering. Her face turned the color of calcimine, the texture of some powdery substance that could crumble at a touch.

  For a minute or two the SS man handled her breasts and her loins vengefully. Her mouth stretched in soundless agony. As though he had been waiting for that, the SS man pulled her to her knees and forced her head down against his body.

  Sol began to moan. But just before tears could bring mercy to his eyes, he saw her recognize him. And from that hideously obscene position, pierced so vilely, she endured the zenith of her agony and was able to pass through it. Until finally she was able to award him the tears of forgiveness. But he was not worthy of her award and took the infinitely meaner triumph of blindness, and though he was reamed by cancerous, fiery torments, he was no longer subject to the horrid view, no longer had to share the obscene experience with her. For a while, he could see nothing, could only feel the air moving around him, hear the familiar sounds of the camp, which now had a homely, familiar note and which made the blood beats of pain in his joints almost bearable. And then he went a step further toward the empty blackness of animal relief; he fainted and felt nothing for a long time.

  He woke palpitating and drenched in sweat, wondering where he was. For a minute or two, he stared full at the lamp bulb. Then he turned his violet-starred vision on the rest of the room, on the window from which a tender breeze came, filtered through the heavy foliage, and then, finally, on the length of his own body, shining with sweat.

  "Good God, how can I stand this?" he said.

  With the answer, that somehow he would have to, vibrating in his brain, he got up and went into the bathroom. He stripped the wet underclothes off and took another shower. When he was dried, he went back into the bedroom. He propped his pillows so he was sitting up, took his book, and began to read. Outside, there was the near-silence of the night, and only his own breathing made the slightest distraction. He read without stopping until morning.

  SIXTEEN

  Marilyn Birchfield woke up behind the walls of her apartment and saw morning with the familiar sensation of hollowness. She swallowed against it as though it were hunger for food.

  There was a delicacy of taste evident all around her room; handsome modern prints, white walls, a nakedly structural bookcase copied from a prominent designer's work and filled with good books, the speaker connected to a high-fidelity phonograph in the living room. There was a Japanese lantern hanging over some austerely simple chests of drawers and a comfortable chair upholstered in brown corduroy upon which lay a bright-orange pillow.

  Only her own body suggested grossness and superfluity.

  "A lot of woman for so little living" was her own selfeffacing joke. It convinced her family and her friends that she was well-adjusted and wholesome. Well, she supposed she was, really, in spite of the guilty images to which she was susceptible in the early morning or late at night, at those times when her body betrayed her because of its idleness. She felt the heavy swing of her breasts and thought of all the babies she could have nourished, moved the wide strength of her hips and felt furtiveness like a pain at the thought of the man they could have brought joy and comfort to.

  But only the vulnerability of her first waking defended those thoughts. She threw her powerful legs over the edge of the bed and so flung herself bravely into the day. Smiling dignity, that was one of her poses; there were worse ones. Just as long as her eyes were open, as long as she continued to laugh at herself whenever her poses began to impress her as truth, she would not become grotesque or pitiable. Having hungers, she must admit them to herself and not dress them in some other guise, like those childless spinsters who dressed their dogs in sweaters and caps and talked to them in baby talk.

  She washed thoroughly in the shower, brushed her teeth for a full five minutes, brushed her shiny brown hair a hundred counted strokes. And then, mildly Spartan, stared square into the mirror at the round, immaculate face, the clear eyes with the beginnings of age mapped in the little intersections around them. It was like morning calisthenics of the spirit, that gazing unflinchingly at her plain, plumply healthy face and, as with calisthenics, she was invigorated by facing clearly who and what she was.

  Not that she was completely tranquilized by that, only that she took the weights of unhappiness from a firmer footing. As she dressed, she noted again her firm, rather gross body and she felt a touch of regret. Now, it was not self-pity, though, but a form of disapproval—she had been brought up to abhor waste in any form. And this somehow recalled the face of Sol Nazerman to her, because she sensed a vast waste of spirit in him. In her pity for him, she exposed herself to an old hurt, too, for she felt hope throb in her where she had thought there was only scar.

  "Oh that poor man," she said aloud as she sipped coffee and stared from her kitchen window toward the distant glint of the river, with its bridges like a child's erector-toy in the morning haze. But she didn't like the patronizing sound of that. Where did she get the idea that he required her pity? She had no idea what went on behind that puffy, alien face. "If he could only be brought out of himself a little..." But then she warned herself against self-deception. Now, now, Marilyn old girl, let's be clear about our motives. Let's not pretend altruism when there is even a suspicion that the re
turn is the most important factor. Yes, Sol Nazerman was a man. But he seemed so full of suffering that she guessed he was not so vulnerable to a woman, after all. Besides, she was rather protected against coveting him as a man, for he was unattractive physically, indeed, seemed old and remote and out of the context of man-woman relationships. But if she had no personal profit in mind, was she perhaps a professional do-gooder?

  Somehow she thought that she was innocent of that, at least as far as he was concerned. There was a profounder disturbance evoked in her than she experienced among the impoverished children she worked with. Something vast and nameless seemed to drag at her spirit when she looked at him or even thought about him. It was as though a great, distant wailing came to her ears, and she felt she could not live in the same world with that sound without trying to do something about it.

  She washed out her cup and saucer and set them in the drainer. Then she closed a drawer, shut a cupboard door, and straightened the slightly biased plant next to the phonograph. Finally she gathered herself for the day at the Youth Center; she loaded her brief case with notebooks and pencils and pads and smiled at the ineffectual aspect of the tools of her trade.

  When she was in the doorway of the apartment, half out in the hallway already, she turned to gaze back inside a little absently, as though she might have left something behind. And in that pose of musing, her finger resting beside her mouth, the brief case weighting one side of her, she spoke aloud to the empty rooms.

  "I will just have to be a pest with him. I'll keep after him. He has too much pain for one person. I can tell by his eyes...."

  SEVENTEEN

  He was busy from the hour of opening. People drifted in quietly, one after another, as though some momentous message had reached them, as though each of them came in answer to a great, silent call. They milled around expectantly with their mobile lips, their ill-shaped teeth and stained, veinous eyes, waiting their turn with ponderous patience. And Sol looked up at each succeeding face with a sort of horror for the appallingly long gauntlet before him.

  Over the heads of the nearest, he saw others still outside, looking in at the display of the windows or just staring at the hot light of the street in an indecisive way as they jingled their tiny treasures, uncertain about what they could gain inside.

  "What do they think it is—Bargain Day?" Sol muttered.

  Over at the other counter, Jesus Ortiz handled his share of the traffic calmly and efficiently. Occasionally he called out some question to his employer, and Sol answered vaguely or agreed with some likely guess. But mostly Ortiz operated with complete self-confidence. There was something reminiscent of Sol in his mannerisms, in the way in which he busied himself with things out of his customers' view when he wished to show disdain for a request, in his habit of returning the object of pawn to reject a demand, in the silent shake of his head, which left no doubt about his firmness, and in the single spasmodic nod that signified agreement. And all of it might have been some unconscious evidence of respect for his teacher as well as pride in a thing well learned.

  In contrast, Sol seemed dazed by the great volume of customers. He looked up frequently to peer out at the street, and felt the weariness from the start; he had a strange feeling that all the city's millions waited in line outside, that he might be there behind the counter for eternity, dealing with succeeding generations, endlessly bargaining, arguing, and struggling against the ugly, benighted faces.

  The objects that people handed over and for which they showed expressions of loss, or regret, or anger at him for taking, all turned cheap and valueless in his hands. He became filled with the idea that he was building a tower of junk, struggling and draining himself to amass nothing. Sometimes he looked up for the face of his assistant as though trying to find sanity in what he was doing. But there would be Ortiz, slim and calm in his vitality and offering no reassurances at all. So he tried to let his mind range out beyond the quietly murmurous crowd, to think wildly of the size of the world, to try to picture other remote ends and strivings, only to finally be forced back into what he was doing. For him, then, the core of life was there in all its reality; brutal, wretched, and grasping. This was what he was down to; below this, there was nothing. So he clung to that harsh actuality as to an abrasive, whirling rock, terrified, furious, and hopeless.

  A coffee-colored man in a black Loden coat, and goateed and horn-rimmed, took a loan on a shiny trumpet. A tall effeminate youth pawned a woman's watch and argued about the price in a high, strained lisp. A chunky Negress wearing fancy harlequin glasses, taking her perpetually pawned heating pad out of hock, spoke in the minimum of monosyllables. An athlete with a closely shaved dense beard that made a shadow on his very dark skin took a loan on a bag of golf clubs and a pair of hockey skates, and his expression said with dismal common sense that he was too old for that stuff anyhow. Puerto Rican women in two stages of life (the disastrous beauty they are prone to and the sudden ruin that follows so early) came and went like a repetidous parody. A man with a brown, Lincolnesque face and wearing an orange shirt pawned his wife's wedding ring. A trio of boys with hollow warrior faces made loans on identical navy-blue suits. A sleepily majestic Negro, who looked like a Swedish king, offered an elaborate truss for money as solemnly as if it were his own insides being proffered. A Chinese-eyed mulatto who wheeled a television set in on a dolly stood bored and tough, and took the first offer with such odd softness of speech that it seemed the words barely made the trip to his lips. A fat, sad white made a hopeless request on his pocket watch, then took Sol's offer with only the slight lengthening of breath that might have been a sigh. A boy no more than fourteen who claimed to be twenty, and tried to raise money on a cigarette case made of tin, cursed professionally when Sol refused him, and threatened malevolence from his vicious turkey-chick's face. From all walks, runs, and stumblings of life they came, and their supply never was exhausted.

  Sol's head began to come apart by the middle of the afternoon. It was as though a crack, begun at the base of his skull in the morning, had now widened to the point where his brains could spill through at any moment. He felt driven to scream, and even opened his mouth; but suddenly he found quiet and emptiness. One late beam of sunshine cut through the dust of the recent stampede. He looked at it for a long, numbed minute. Then he slowly raised his harrowed face like a very old man.

  Jesus Ortiz smiled at him and nodded confirmation that they had been through that assault and were there to tell the story.

  "What are you smiling at?" Sol asked in a croaking voice. He felt that tremulous irritation the old feel at the sight of something young and fresh looking.

  "I guess I like my work," Ortiz answered.

  "Aha. And perhaps you would like to have a shop of your own?" Sol asked with deceptive blandness. "One like this—perhaps this very one?"

  "I wouldn't mind it." Ortiz looked around slowly. "1 would make systems and all. And I would put my name on the door in gold letters—Proprietor, J. Ortiz. Yeah, I comin' to think this a good business for me. Like the surprises—you get a lot of surprises in a business like this. You never know when a special item gonna come you way here. A great diamond, a old, old piece of gold jewelry, valuable things..."

  Sol began to laugh, a harsh, devilish sound in the quiet.

  Ortiz looked at him curiously, his face tight and wary.

  "Why you laugh, Sol? Is it so funny what I say?"

  "Oh no, no, it is really not funny at all. And you want this so badly that you would do almost anything to get it?"

  Ortiz didn't answer. He stared guardedly at the Pawnbroker, wondering what the Jew knew or thought he knew.

  "Yes, of course you would," Sol said in a distantly musing voice. It was as though he felt a perverse pleasure at recognizing the shape of the walls that closed on him.

  "It's a way to make money, ain't it? You say makin' money is the big thing youself. Ain't nothin' else matter much, do it?" He spoke from where he stood, still behind the other counter, and the
re was something oddly formal in their conversing across the store like this: the quality of a debate or a trial in which the issues were mercurial and ever-changing.

  "No, that is right, nothing," Sol answered. He stared at the empty floor where lately so many customers had been. "And even that, sometimes ... it, too, can turn to dust. No matter, though..."

  "Yahh."

  "Is it not funny how they pile in here like that for hours on end, and suddenly—no one."

  "It funny," Ortiz agreed.

  They spent some time contemplating nothing, while outside the store the street unrolled its seamless, unexciting tableau whose background changed color subtly with the waning daylight.

  Finally Ortiz asked in a sleepy voice, "What was that you was startin' to tell about them real-good diamonds?"

  "You won't see any of those in here," Sol said.

  "Maybe not, but I want to know, just in case...."

  "Well, what is the difference." He sighed and then replenished the exhaled breath. "The very best, of course, are the rare fancies. They come in all kinds of strange colors, like bronze and canary and even black. But aside from those, which are very, very rare, the best of the others are the jagers, which are a sort of brilliant sky blue inside, like a burning core of daylight. Then-you have the wesseltons, which are a harder, more metallic blue. After that you have the river diamonds and the crystals...."